Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Entry 1: Day 18

It’s been 18 days since the launch of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (which henceforth shall be known as “MGSV”) and I’m just now sitting down to write a piece about it. It would have been interesting to see my initial thoughts and witness the progression my feelings have taken since I started playing, but I didn’t do it, but oh well, better late than never I guess.

Speaking of feelings though, it is interesting how many directions I have been pulled during my time with the game. And I’m not talking about when Revolver Ocelot kills (made you look!). But seriously, I’m not talking about the story, I’m talking about the gameplay and the things the game does that cause me to be conflicted in how I feel about it at this point.

I should open by saying that I got the game on launch day (on PC) and, according to Steam, I have put 65 hours into it thus far (it would be way more if my boss would just let me play MGSV at work). But a number of those hours were spent with the game idle so stuff could build/develop while I was doing actual life things.

Which brings me to my first notch against the game. There seems to be no (or at least very little) consideration for players that do more than eat, sleep, and play MGSV. What I mean by that, for those of you who have not played the game, is that there are mechanics within the game (base building, item/weapon development, etc.) that take real time to progress. So you start building the next platform that will allow you to expand your troops and get better stuff and it says it will complete in 2 hours. You, being the dashing, logical human that you are, think to yourself “damn, that’s a while, but oh well, I’ll just queue it up before going to bed, turn the game off, and when I start back up tomorrow night, it will be complete.” MGSV, however, has a different idea.

See, the 2 hours, is in real in-game time which means the game needs to be running for those 2 hours. Now this all by itself is annoying, but this aggravation is compounded when you add in the fact that there is this whole mystical morality system that isn’t explained, but basically requires you to take your character back to base and wander around looking for troops to interact with so they don’t start to hate you and mutiny or some shit. Therefore, the time you are spent idle letting your base build also hurts you because your troops think you don’t love them anymore because all you do is sit in your helicopter starting at your countdown timers.

Rather than just letting you get back to doing what is fun (playing MGSV), the game restricts you. This sucks because playing MGSV is really, really, fun!

That’s all for today. This one focused on a negative so next time I’ll be sure to highlight some more positives of the game because I’m 18 days in and see no signs of slowing down.